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James Love writes I’m driving in France, Spain, and Italy this summer and would like to use my phone for calls and internet in all three. Which are the best local SIM cards to buy?

Donald Strachan replies If you only want to make a few calls and send the odd text, it is usually not worth changing your UK SIM. For example, O2’s standard rates are 24p per minute to call, and 7p to text if you use your phone in France. That’s cheaper than many domestic networks. It is another story with data, however. The cap on data prices is due to fall again on July 1, to €0.20/17p per megabyte (Mb), but local deals are much cheaper. So, as long as your phone is unlocked (check before you go), it may pay to buy a local SIM.

In Italy, TIM (tim.it) and Vodafone (vodafone.it) offer the best coverage. A pay-as-you-go (PAYG) tariff is a ricaricabile. Standard call rates are €0.12/10p per minute. When using data, always buy a prepaid bundle. Internet Start from TIM costs €10 (£8.25) for 2 Gb (gigabytes) of internet, valid for a month. If you want calls and internet bundled together, Vodafone is slightly cheaper than TIM. SMART 200 costs €10 for 200 minutes, 200 texts and 1 Gb of data.

Spanish prepaid (prepago) prices are usually quoted without VAT, currently 21 per cent. The Orange (orange.es) Ballena bundle costs €12 (£9.90) for 1 Gb of data plus 1,000 texts, and calls on the plan are charged at €0.01 (1p) per minute. Ballena is valid for 30 days.

Vodafone (vodafone.es) has the SMART 12 package, with 1 Gb of internet, 60 texts and an hour of talktime. It costs €14.52 (£11.97) including VAT and is also valid for 30 days.

In France data is much cheaper with a prepaid SIM (a carte prépayée sans engagement). With Bouygues’ (bouyguestelecom.fr) Formule 24/24, it costs €10 (£8.25) for unlimited national calls and texts, plus 200 Mb (megabytes) of data, valid for a month. A €20 (£16.50) top-up with SFR’s La Carte buys unlimited calls and texts plus 300 Mb of data, valid for a month.

Turkey is outside the regulated EU zone. With a Turkcell (turkcell.com.tr) hazir kart (PAYG SIM), calls cost 16p for three minutes. Prepaid data bundles start from £2.44. In theory the SIM will stop working in an unregistered foreign handset after a week or so, but that won’t matter on a short holiday.

Pretty much anywhere, a new local SIM costs only nominal fee, and comes with a small amount of call credit pre-loaded onto the card. You simply pay for any extra you think you will need. The best place to buy one is from a local branded high street phone shop.

Note that if you have a contract with Three in the UK (three.co.uk), you can make calls and send texts to UK numbers, and use your data allowance, at no extra roaming cost. This applies for travel to Italy, Australia, the US and seven other countries, so far.

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